Mandriva Linux 2006 Review Continued

Anonymous Coward writes "The second part of the extensive Linux Tips for Free Mandriva Linux 2006 review has been published, going into details about the state of Linux hardware support and compatibility, hardware configuration and software with a whole section on digital photography. Part one was previously discussed on Slashdot."

Comments

Re:Quality of Articles

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Free.fr is a French ISP offering free web hosting (up to 1 GB, one of the first free PHP/MYSQL host company here), free mails, free dial-up (which was their main business few years ago).. Well pretty much everything free except their excellent ADSL2+ (24 Mbps) offer which costs 30 euros (and comes with tons of other goodies like free phone/VoIP and ADSL TV, a static IP and a custom reverse DNS and.. and .. and much more). These guys rock: they only use OSS (mainly Linux powered) and provide us with their "best effort": if a new technology comes they'll offer it to every subscriber without any more condition; my bandwidth changed from 20 to 24Mbps recently and I didn't have to sign another contract or to do anything. I know a few techies from the company (we used to lurk on IRC) and they all are free software fanatics. Free provides official support for OS X and Linux, and their ADSL2+ + TV + phone modem (the "Freebox") runs Linux.

On the other side, the website http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/ is only an hosted website, it has nothing to do afaik with Free itself, while the Mandriva (and Debian, and pretty much every major distro) mirrors are managed on the official ftp.free.fr FTP server by Free's team.

So yeah Free rocks, but this website is only an hosted website (please note: to get an account you must be a French citizen, they send you a request by traditional mail, but they don't put any ad on your website and their bandwidth is huge, so they couldn't freely allow everyone).

Btw, they're already starting WiMax experimentations and installations, it should be available next year or so :). We used to struggle to get a decent connection, and now France seems a good place for Internet connectivity. Talking 'bout Japan and Tokyo? Wait: in Paris (15th arr.) too, they have optic fiber (100Mbps symmetrical) for 50 euros a month (and with TV and VoIP once again) :)

Re:why?

[rolfwind]

Now that lots of Linux distros are fairly easy to install, what's the motivation to go with a commercial RPM-based distro?

Well, for one, the for-pay distribution target mostly businesses so a loss at the individual level (home user) is not so important - and Businesses want peace of mind that comes with support.

Also, there are licenses that for-pay distributions have to pay to be allowed to distribute. This isn't in the base linux system but stuff like various non-free multimedia codecs or the nonfree mp3 format IIRC. It's too much hassle for businesses to track these down but they don't want to be caught with their pants down if a software audit ever comes in. Enter Redhat/whover, they took care of this already.

Notice that distros like Ubuntu have you download this stuff from other repositories and not their own, meaning that you are responsible for having the correct licenses. For a home user, this is not likely going to be a risk, but the business owner is well to cover is ass.

To me, the hard part about Linux now is not the install, it's stuff like getting sound and printing to work. Is that any easier on Mandriva than on Ubuntu, or vanilla Debian?

In my experience, (current Ubuntu user), the distro that autodetects the most stuff for you is the easiest^_^ And all package based major distros are all about the same amount of work getting something to work if it's not autodetected. Source based distros like Gentoo can be another can of worms, I'm not sure.

Re:It looks good

[Hosiah]

Your question is wildly ranging into the hypothetical, so I can't give you an answer like "six months, 32 days, 11 hours, and five minutes". To get an idea what it takes to make a Linux distro from the ground up, try one of the source-based distributions: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Source- based&origin=All&basedon=All&desktop=All&architect ure=All&status=Active I can't vouch for any personally except Linux From Scratch, which works if you Follow the Book exactly. Now, to start with Debian and release it as your own distro, that's less work...provided you did the from-the-ground-up thing so you understand what and why of the guts of a Linux system. Almost all of the distros out there are based on derivatives of Red Hat or Debian (*sniff* and something like only two for my fave Slackware!). Pick up Knoppix sometime for a prime example of a Debian-based distro.

Now, Mandriva is one distro with it's act together. No text-mode installer or arcane package manager syntax for Mandriva - it's the *easiest* distro you'll ever run. But that comes at a price, because it's also *hardest* for a developer to create an interface that's a smooth, seamless uh.. $EXPERIENCE than it is to just make the damn program work already and slap the command line interface on it with a shell script wrapper.

Re:flakey market

[rmm4pi8]

Not everyone, I'm still on Mandriva. I know everyone says it's just for new people, but no one has given me a reason to switch: SuSE's YaST screws up hand-edited config files, Fedora requires much more set up to get running, and Ubuntu--why? Slackware and Gentoo just don't make sense for a laptop user who upgrades frequently. So why the beef with Mandriva--what's the downside? Everything they write is GPL, too.

Besides, Mandriva has a fairly good community, as I'll demonstrate here by reiterating my offer to provide free email/IM support to any Slashdot-reading Mandriva user (or potential switcher). I'm not a kernel-hacker or anything, but I have been using it on desktops, laptops, and servers for 4 years now, and I can fix most things when they break.